The Pacific Rim International Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) was initiated in Japan in 1990, to create an artificial intelligence (AI) conference which would promote collaborative exploitation of AI in the Pacific Rim nations.

The conference has grown, both in participation and scope, and now includes participation from all major Asia Pacific nations. The conference also attracts participation from all over the world, including Europe, Africa, India, and South America.

Dear PRICAI Community, 


As you are all aware by now, IJCAI-PRICAI 2020 has been postponed to January 2021. Regular updates will be provided on the IJCAI-PRICAI 2020 website (https://ijcai20.org/). I would like to share with you a message that has been sent to us by the IJCAI team. On behalf of the IJCAI-PRICAI 2020 team, I would like to thank you for your ongoing patience can support and hope to see you all provide strong support for the conference when it is held in January 2021. 

Hideyuki Nakashima, PRICAI Chair

Message from IJCAI team - June 9th 2020

Dear PRICAI steering chairs,

Thank you very much for your continuous support for IJCAI-PRICAI2020.  As you know, we postponed IJCAI-PRICAI2020 to January 2021. We already informed this to professor Nakashima (steering committee chair of PRICAI). But, in order to share our current situation widely, we are sending this message to you.

Because of COVID-19 outbreak, we have been very carefully discussing and investigating several scenarios to realize very good IJCAI-PRICAI 2020 conference. Because of our standard quality and size, it is not easy task to find the location and the dates which fit to what we are hoping.

Our first priority is to find the way to realize in-person conference. This is because the main function of the conference (in particular IJCAI) is socializing people. In this sense, the original dates (July 2020) are impossible. Thus, we have been working to find the possible dates and places. Also we are supposing to have a hybrid conference between smaller in-person and virtual. This is, even if we do an in-person conference, it is not easy to gather all the people from all over the world in these years.

About the dates, at least it is not safe to hold a in-person (any size) conference in 2020. Also, AAAI2021 is going to happen in the early February 2021. Thus, the most desired period for us is January 2021. This is very tight condition and we understood it is very tough to find a venue which can meet this requirement.

But, currently, fortunately, Kyoto and Pacifico, Yokohama have been proposing a kind of good offers, and we are still investigating more detailed about them.

Also, as another scenario, if there is 2nd wave (or more waves) of COVID-19 happens, we still have an opinion to go the complete virtual conference.

This is what we have done now. Our sincere request to PRICAI community is that  there could be better possibility to be able to travel to Japan for Asian countries in Jan 2021. Thus, if we go with an in-person conference, it would be very nice if you could cooperate to attend IJCAI-PRICAI2020 as much as possible to make it successful.

 

Marie desJardins, Conference Chair

Christian Bessiere, Program Chair

Takayuki Ito, Local Arrangements Chair

Vesna Sabljakovic-Fritz, IJCAI Executive Secretary

Bernhard Nebel, IJCAI Secretary-Treasurer

Fahiem Bacchus, President, IJCAI Board of Trustees